- The Dot meta-character matches any single character, without caring what that character is
- Note : Dot does not matches the new line character.
- Dot is not a meta-character in character set [ ]
- Dot is a very powerful regex metacharacter and it allows you to be lazy i.e you put a dot and everything matches in regex
- It is adviced to use Dot meta character sparingly since it matches everything it causes regex to match character that we don’t want to match
Example : If you want to match date format 03/11/2035 you can write a regex like this “\d\d.\d\d.\d\d\d\d” but also matches 03-11-2015 and 03.11.2015
We can improve our regex search for using character class like this “\d\d[/]\d\d[/]\d\d\d\d”
In the above example we don’t have any control of what all character . can match if the above date format input hence it is very dangerous to use dot meta character in regex.
Use Character Sets Instead of the Dot
- Dot meta character is used most of the time when they know there can be a special character inside the search so you can either blacklist or white-list the charters using character set instead of using dot meta character
- In the above example of date we can use negated character set to compare date
Q & A
Input : Hello world this is a date 03/11/2035 which has to be found using Regex
But it should not match 03\11\2035 or 03 11 2035 or 03-11-2035
Search : 03/11/2035
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Regex Using Character set : \d\d[/]\d\d[/]\d\d\d\d
Regex Using Negated Character set : \d\d[^a-zA-Z0-9\-. ]\d\d[^a-zA-Z0-9\-. ]\d\d\d\d